V Rising Review Summary

Fluid, deep, and varied combat: The combat system is praised for its depth, fluidity, and variety. Players can experiment with different weapons, spells, and builds to create unique playstyles. Boss fights are challenging and rewarding, requiring strategic thinking and skillful execution.

Extensive, customizable castle building: Castle building is a major highlight, offering extensive customization and creative freedom. Players can design and decorate their castles with various functional and aesthetic elements. The ability to relocate the entire base is a unique and convenient feature.

Engaging, rewarding gameplay loop: The game offers a satisfying gameplay loop with a compelling mix of combat, crafting, exploration, and base-building. Players can choose their preferred playstyle, whether it's focusing on combat, building elaborate castles, or exploring the open world. The game consistently rewards player effort with new content, abilities, and a sense of progression.

Stunning graphics and atmosphere: The game features stunning graphics, a well-designed world, and an immersive atmosphere. The art style, music, and sound design all contribute to a cohesive and engaging experience. The world feels alive and detailed, encouraging exploration and discovery.

Immersive vampire theme: The game effectively captures the vampire theme, incorporating elements of vampire lore and creating an immersive experience. Players must manage their bloodlust, avoid sunlight, and utilize their vampiric abilities to survive and thrive. The game's atmosphere and setting are well-suited to the vampire theme.

Progression gated behind bosses: Progression is heavily gated behind defeating bosses to unlock crafting recipes and gear upgrades, creating a linear and restrictive experience. Gear level differences create significant difficulty spikes, making it hard to progress if under-leveled. This system limits player choice and strategic options, forcing a specific path.

Unbalanced and frustrating boss fights: Many reviewers found the boss fights to be unbalanced and frustrating due to high damage, excessive health, unavoidable attacks, and reliance on RNG. Some bosses have unavoidable one-shot abilities, while others are damage sponges. These issues are exacerbated by long cooldowns on player abilities and limited healing, leading to an unfair experience.

Excessive grinding and repetition: Many reviewers found the game to be excessively grindy, especially in the late game, with tedious resource farming and crafting requirements. This repetition, combined with a lack of meaningful endgame content, leads to player fatigue and reduces replayability. The game's structure may feel repetitive, as it primarily involves defeating bosses to upgrade gear and fight stronger bosses.

Unbalanced and punishing PvP: The PvP environment is often unbalanced and punishing, especially for solo or new players. Experienced players with superior gear can dominate and grief weaker players, leading to a toxic community and hindering healthy competition. The game's balance is primarily from a PvP perspective, negatively impacting the PvE experience.

Lacks content and story: The game lacks substantial content, a compelling story, and meaningful NPC interactions, making the world feel empty and underdeveloped. Infrequent updates and save incompatibility issues further diminish the player experience, with major updates often requiring players to restart their progress, negating hours of investment.

Unique blood-based powers/buffs: The game features a unique blood mechanic where consuming blood grants temporary buffs and abilities. Different enemy types provide varying blood types and qualities, influencing player stats and playstyle. This system encourages strategic targeting of different blood types to gain specific advantages.

Dynamic and varied game world: The game world feels alive, with dynamic interactions between different entities. Bosses have unique skills and multiple phases. The game features different lands with unique inhabitants, such as cursed forests and mutant-filled areas.

Gear score replaces leveling: The game uses a gear score system instead of leveling up. The player's level is the sum of the levels of their currently equipped items. Character stats improve with equipped gear, encouraging progression.

Customizable character builds: Players can customize their character builds with different weapons, spells, and gems. Spells can be upgraded through special jewels that enhance abilities or add effects. There are multiple schools of magic to unlock and different gear sets to create unique builds and playstyles.

Elaborate crafting system: The crafting system involves multiple tables for different item types, with containers attached to tables that hold completed items. Players can queue multiple recipes, and the crafting table will prematurely take the resources from inventory. The game features an open map with settlements, towns, animals, people and monsters, providing loot for crafting.

Generally smooth, stable performance: The game generally runs smoothly on a variety of hardware, including the Steam Deck and lower-end PCs. Most players report stable performance, good frame rates, and acceptable loading times. Some players have reported minor graphical glitches or the need for decent PC requirements.

Network and server stability issues: Some players have experienced network and server-related issues, including lag, desynchronization, and connection drops. These problems seem more prevalent in multiplayer scenarios with a higher number of players. Some players are experiencing server connection issues even when plugged into ethernet, suggesting it's not an internet-related problem.

Crashes when taking screenshots: Taking screenshots can cause the game to freeze, often resulting in death. Game crashed, leading to loss of progress.

Poor controller optimization: Playing with a controller is a suffering due to poor optimization. Controller bindings cannot be remapped.

Unreliable ability activation: Some abilities, like Ice Block, can be unreliable due to finicky activation requirements. This can lead to frustrating deaths when the ability fails to trigger in critical situations.

Excellent value and highly recommended: The game is highly recommended and considered worth the price, offering a polished, complete, and immersive experience. Many reviewers highlight its addictive gameplay, replayability, and the developers' commitment to ongoing support and improvements. Some even consider it a GOTY contender or one of the best in its genre.

Customizable, grindy, unbalanced bosses: The game offers a unique blend of ARPG, survival, and base-building elements, but its enjoyment heavily depends on individual preferences and tolerance for grinding. Customizing server settings is often recommended to tailor the experience, especially for solo players. Some reviewers find the boss design unbalanced and frustrating, particularly on higher difficulties.

PvP-focused, PvE an afterthought: The game's design leans towards PvP, which impacts the PvE experience. New players are advised to start with PvE to learn the mechanics before engaging in PvP. Some reviewers feel that PvE is an afterthought, while others enjoy it for castle building and boss fights.

Customize server settings essential: Customizing server settings is highly recommended, especially for solo players, to adjust resource processing, crafting times, and building limits. This allows players to tailor the game to their preferred playstyle and minimize real-world chores. Playing on private servers is also suggested to avoid data loss.

Good for survival crafting fans: The game is recommended for fans of survival crafting and base-building games. Reviewers enjoy building custom castles and customizing game rules. The game is also recommended for co-op play with friends or a significant other.

Vampire survival RPG blend: The game blends vampire lore with survival, crafting, and action RPG elements. Players awaken as a weakened vampire and must grow in power, build a castle, and dominate the world. The setting is a dark, gothic world inspired by Castlevania.

Minimal story, cosmetic DLCs: The game features minimal story, with lore primarily found in item descriptions and boss backstories. All DLCs are cosmetic, offering customization options for characters and castles without affecting gameplay. This allows players to focus on the core gameplay loop.

Extensive server customization options: The game offers extensive server customization options, allowing players to tailor their experience. Players can choose between solo, cooperative, PvP, and PvE modes, with options for private or public servers. This flexibility caters to a wide range of playstyles.

Mixed opinions on completeness: Some reviewers feel the game is unfinished and needs more armor options and customization. Some reviewers also note that building and crafting from chests is still not possible. However, other reviewers feel the game is complete and not like an early access title.

Suitable for wide audience: The game is suitable for a wide audience, including teens and adults. Some reviewers even suggest it's suitable for kids and grandmothers. This suggests the game is accessible and enjoyable for a broad range of players.